What people?

“What is the people? I don’t know. Does it exist? I can’t answer that question.”incipit of Gérard Bras’ book is not a provocation, much less an authorial coquetry. In negative form, it is indeed his thesis that he expresses, a thesis whose positivity the book will establish. Bringing to light the question of the people, such is the object of these “elements of a conceptual history” which leads us from XVIII^e century, where the sovereign people seem to triumph, until our days when they seem to have disappeared.

The question of the people

Conceptual history, not history of ideas or philosophy: just as he does not seek the permanence of the idea of ​​the people, Gérard Bras does not expose the successive conceptions that philosophers have been able to have of it. While he in no way underestimates the historical weight of Hobbes, Rousseau or Hegel, he also shows the inaugural importance of the debates of June 1789 between Mirabeau and Sieyès, the intensity of Michelet’s thought or the symptomatic ambivalences of de Gaulle’s texts. It is unfortunately not possible to go into the details here of a historical journey that is far too rich to be summarized without damage. Let us simply say that these “elements of conceptual history” explain why “people” poses a question rather than stating a concept. A question that we find at the end, no longer as that of a philosopher worried about democracy, but as the question that literally is the people itself. For if the word “people” is still available for a policy of emancipation, it is on the condition that it remains “the name of a questionnever settled” (p. 354, the author’s emphasis).

Thus Gérard Bras does not go from ignorance to knowledge but from ignorance to questioning. This is because, from the “people”, there can be no science, the word not referring to a set of empirically given facts. Gérard Bras’ investigation aims to show that the people only exist when men, seizing the word, declare being the people, a gesture that cannot be reduced to any social explanation by domination and alienation. One of the strong theses of this work, which contains many, is in fact that exploitation cannot be the sufficient cause of the advent of the people on the political scene. This will be theexplicit of the book: the people pose a “political question that cannot be reduced to that of exploitation” (p. 354). The “people” is political in the sense that it is born from a gesture that is of course rooted in a cry, a suffering, an indignation, but which always presupposes an act, a decision by which men, by declaring themselves “the people”, demand a transformation of the social order as a whole. As we can see, “people” is a performative; rather than an idea, it is a proposition: ” we the people ” In this sense, it is an inherently revolutionary word.

Alienated, the people?

To construct the question of the people, the book digs beneath the apparent clarity of a signifier whose signifieds are supposedly well known. “People” first designates the populus Latin, namely the group of citizens who are members of the State and who, in a modern regime where the people are sovereign, constitute the foundation of political authority. But the word also has a social meaning (in the expression “the people of the people” for example) which refers to the poorest part of society, which brings it closer to the plebs Roman, the inferior and submissive part of society, supposedly uncultured and therefore incompetent, dangerous above all because of the passions of envy and resentment attributed to it. If the concept of a sovereign people tends to reduce the people to the State, the social concept of the people as a class of the poor tends to identify it with the populace. Finally, “people” refers to a community that recognizes itself as such in its culture (its language, its traditions and ways of being) – it is the ethnos of the Ancients, whose most powerful modern figure is the nation. To these three meanings it is necessary to add a fourth, which innervates, or rather haunts (p. 19) the first three: the multitude (multitude), the masses, or the Number. Now, when we say “the sovereign people declare that”, or “the hungry people are angry”, or “the French people have kept their refractory Gallic spirit”, the usage is quite fixed and the context always sufficiently clear so that we are not mistaken. We could therefore believe that there is nothing to think about here. But far from the areas of definition of the signifier “people” being clearly distinguished, they are in reality interdependent, and react on each other systematically. Gérard Bras indeed suggests that “people” is part of a differential system of meanings (p. 21) where it returns to the multitude to articulate the device populus-plebs-ethnos – which it does only by putting it in crisis. This is why the “people” is not a social thing but rather “a question that modern politics poses to itself, which insists (…)” (p. 28). What question? That of democracy.

We live in a world where the people are no longer the subject of History, the very idea of ​​History having sunk with that of the subject. If the people are not a substantial subject, in what sense can they still carry emancipation? The “real question is whether and how the name ‘people’ can support a position in favor of a policy of emancipation” (p. 289). Because this is no longer self-evident; ‘people’ is no longer necessarily the agent of democracy. Between the two pitfalls of the totalitarian capture of the people and its current dilution in liberalism, what link can we still think of between the people and democracy? One thing is certain now, this link is not necessary.

The people who tended towards democracy by themselves were the One People constructed by the philosophy of history developed in XIX^e century – this alienated people who were supposed to lead the whole of society to reconciliation. G. Bras strongly denounces the ease of resorting to domination and alienation. We can understand the success of this category: the people who cheer dictators, howl against foreigners, vomit the learned, demand bread and games, do not exactly correspond to the idea of ​​the People that those who know what true democracy is, and who are obliged to affirm that this people, who do not seem to desire the Revolution, are alienated, since they act against democracy. From this eminently aristocratic position (in that it claims to know what the people really are, think and want), we arrive directly at wanting to free the people, first of all from… themselves. “He who knows what the people are will not delay in distributing certificates of authenticity that will assign one to the glory of being one, another to the infamy of not being one” (p. 17). Refusing this position of superiority – which is that of Lenin for example (p. 332 sq.) – implies that we also assume its direct consequence: we have no criteria allowing us to separate the good popular “demands” from the bad ones (p. 291). Dissatisfied with the domination-alienation dyad, G. Bras begins by taking the measure of an unpleasant truth: it is not because there is no democracy without a people, that there is democracy as soon as there is a people. It is the whole point of populism (analyzed in chap. 6) to confront progressive democrats with this problem.

An ambiguous signifier

The epistemological obstacle of alienation having been removed, the work shows that the evil comes from further afield. It comes from the fact that the “people” are always constituted by exclusive inclusion. So the populus does it only come about as such by excluding the plebs – who claims, in return, to be the populus. Excluded, the plebs is not thrown out of the walls, but on the contrary left within the walls. It is included as excluded. Its otherness as a populace is internal to the populus. And this operation of exclusive inclusion is multiplied when we take into account the signified. ethnos. A nation only becomes aware of itself in relation to others, who are then included in it as a negative but founding part of its identity. Thus a people only asserts itself in reality in a double exclusive inclusion: citizen against populace, but also “national” against foreigner. We see the complication that the system of differences envelops: as a member of theethnosthe plebeian includes-excludes the other plebeian who happens to be a foreigner. This structuring contradiction makes “people” an essentially ambiguous signifier (p. 281sq.).

In these conditions, the temptation is great to do without a word whose meaning cannot be guaranteed by any criteria. And since the multitude comes to smash the device populus-plebs-ethnoswould it not be better to continue to use it as the primary category of a thought of emancipation, as has been the case for half a century now? G. Bras rejects this substitution of the multitude for the people. While sharing the achievements of the deconstruction of the People-One, he does not accept the disappearance of the signifier people in favor of the multitude. Why?

In whatever form we apprehend it – homogeneous nation, pure race, working class represented by the Party – the One People is inevitably caught up in a dynamic unlimited of exclusion, because it is vital that it ward off all division. The multitude reveals that the people are never one, that they are always separated, not only from others but from themselves, that they are therefore internally divided (p. 282). Very attentive to the Spinozist lesson of the multitude, G. Bras does not want to stop there. It is on this point, moreover, that the work is truly innovative. The close discussion of Paolo Virno’s book, Grammar of the multitudemanifests it forcefully. P. Virno opposes the power of the Number to the power of the One, the totalitarian nature of the “people” to the plural movement of the collective. G. Bras takes a salutary step aside, arguing that the category of multitude, effective against totalitarianism, is much less so when it itself finds itself caught up in the capitalist and technological capture of its affects. No more than the “People”, the Number mechanically opens the way to emancipation (except by resorting again to alienation, which the concept of multitude had precisely the function of overcoming). By its very ambiguity, the signifier “people” maintains the horizon of unity: a people is the configuration of a mass into a collective unit that carries a universal claim for freedom and equality. Without this intended unity, the promise could not claim universality, and without this claim we fall back into exclusive inclusion, the negation of democracy. We have learned to detach the signifier “people” from the deadly ideology of progress, we must learn to untie it from the devastating logic of identity, if it is true that all identity comes from the structure of exclusive inclusion.

The horizon of unity is vital to democracy. This is what is meant by the discreet but recurring reference to the Deleuzian concept of the “missing people.” The missing people are not the absent people, they are the people of whom we are deprived today, of whom we cannot do without, although their identity is unassignable. The concept certainly does not express the nostalgia for the One People, but neither is it reducible to the fascination for the subversive multitude. It speaks of the quest for a unification without which the promise of universal justice is reversed into a celebration of identities and ends in an apology for their competition.

When he has closed this rare book, the reader may come to ask himself a question in turn: under what conditions can we think politically a unity that does not translate into an exclusive identity? how to untangle the aim of unity and the closure of identity? A question that can be formulated differently: is “people” only the name of the destitution of the established order, at the risk of identifying with the subversive power of the multitude? or does the unity aimed at by the signifier also indicate its instituting capacity?